Congress returning for lame-duck session
Lawmakers face challenges as balance of power shifts
WASHINGTON — Lawmakers returning to Capitol Hill this week face a reckoning with an unwelcome reality of a gridlocked Washington: the lame-duck session’s growing pile of unresolved, but critical, legislation and a narrow window to act.
How the two chambers of returning, retiring and defeated lawmakers approach this session — further complicated by a president seemingly angling for a spending fight and an incoming freshman class that promises to alter the balance of power — will set the tone, and possibly some of the agenda, for the 116th Congress to come.
For Republicans, the session presents a final chance to leave a legacy-making mark while they still control all the levers of power. Democrats are contending with a more complicated mix of motivations: They have little incentive to cave to conservative demands on the cusp of their takeover of the House in January, but they are also reluctant to drag issues from the lame-duck session into next year, preferring instead to start on their own agenda.
Hanging in the balance are a reau-
thorization of the farm bill, the largest federal criminal justice rewrite in a generation, President Donald Trump’s border wall and a potential government shutdown.
The most immediately critical legislation may be the seven remaining appropriations bills to ensure that the entire government remains funded past a Dec. 7 deadline. Issues including a fight over spending on border security — the Senate included $1.6 billion in its bill, compared with the House’s $5 billion — have bogged down negotiations, and Trump has threatened to veto legislation without funds for a wall at the border with Mexico.
“We have the will to put the money at the border for better security and combine it with some sensible reforms, including things like a path to citizenship, things like making sure that we have workers on our fields and in our factories that we need,” Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., said on ABC’s This Week. “But what I don’t think we should do is shut down the government. And that, again, is in his hands and his party’s hands.”
Lawmakers from both parties have said that they want to avoid a shutdown, and that passing the appropriations bills — which would fund a number of federal agencies, including the Homeland Security, Agriculture and Commerce departments — is a priority for their final weeks. But any resolution needs at least some bipartisan support to clear the Senate’s 60-vote threshold, leaving a resolution unclear. Aides involved with the negotiations said a possible path forward might become apparent only in the coming days.
If negotiations falter, Congress could avoid a shutdown by temporarily funding the government into the new year, but that would force it to take up the appropriations fight again in January. Lawmakers have passed spending measures covering other parts of the government.
And Trump remains a wild card. Despite attempts from Republican leaders to dissuade him, he doubled down on his veto threat during his Thanksgiving vacation in Florida.
“Could there be a shutdown? There certainly could,” Trump told reporters at his Florida estate Thursday. “And it will be about border security, of which the wall is a part.”
But Democratic lawmakers, who have also roiled negotiations by flirting with attaching a measure that would give enhanced job protections to special counsel Robert Mueller say there is little incentive to endorse border security provisions that include billions of dollars for Trump’s wall and essentially rebuff the demands of the voters who swept in a new Democratic majority. Many incoming members won with campaigns that disavowed a wall.
“We will not go along with a wasteful wall that is designed frankly to gin up his base,” Rep. Nita Lowey, the top Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee, said in an interview this month.
“Everyone agrees that we need to secure our borders,” she added. “President Trump’s proposed wall is not the right way to do it.”
Republicans are equally reluctant to have a government shutdown — even a partial one — taint what is already seen as one of the most bitter and divisive Congresses in history.
“I do not want to see the government shut down,” Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, said Sunday on CNN’s State of the Union. “If we can avoid that situation, we absolutely need to do that.”